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From TVLine:

According to sources, Carell’s return engagement qualifies as more of a cameo than a full-fledged guest appearance. (It’s unclear if Carell will be joined by his Office soul mate Amy Ryan.)

An NBC spokesperson declined to comment, while Carell’s rep insists that the Office finale will be Scott-free.

On Saturday, Carell surprised thousands of Office fans when he joined his former co-stars at a huge “wrap party” held in the real Scranton, Pennsylvania

The series finale airs May 16 and brings back former "Office" stars Mindy Kaling and B.J. Novak.

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Creed: No, I don't, but I'd love to hear something by them.

Schaefer: Well, you may change your opinion about that.

Creed: Are they the rap group? Country western? Polka?

Schaefer then played Creed's 2000 hit/flop, "With Arms Wide Open," for Bratton. This was the actor's response:

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1. "The Office," Jim and Pam

The major difference between the American “Office” and the British “Office” is a matter of heart: The American “Office” has a lot of it, a big sentimental, sweet streak that the British “Office” would have scoffed at. So despite being about a dozen dysfunctional weirdos stuck in dead-end jobs, “The Office” has always been aces at romance, the adorable, sweet, funny kind. Nowhere was this more evident than Jim and Pam’s wedding, which took place both on a boat in Niagara Falls, just the two of them, and at a more public ceremony where their colleagues ripped off a viral video. This is the only instance it's totally fine to tear up, in a squishy way, at a Chris Brown song.

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One of the long-running, undercover sadnesses of ‘The Office” was the status of Jim Halpert, a likable guy who could do so much more, but didn’t want to. An essay in the Awl a few years ago described “The Office” as the "most depressing show on television" because of Jim, a man audiences think of as the funny, competent, prank-playing, romantic hero of the show, but who is actually “a mediocre man who has already realized his full potential,” content to wile away his life at a dysfunctional paper company. This season, Jim finally realized that he can do more, that he wants to do more, and he did what he should have done a long time ago: He got a new job. In Philadelphia.

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Showrunner Greg Daniels said in January that Carell "was very much of the opinion that the ‘Goodbye Michael’ episode and story arc leading up to it was the goodbye to the fans and the show." According to Daniels, the rest of "The Office" crew is now ready to say goodbye, however. Star Rainn Wilson told Salon in December:

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I wanted to share with you a truly sad and fascinating series of videos. In 1998 in New York City, I worked with a young man named Wally White. He was a film-maker from NYU and had had some success with his low-budget indie film, 'Lie Down With Dogs' which was released by Miramax back in the day. His second feature, "WALDO WALKER", was never finished or released (Wally, true story, later committed suicide). It's now been posted on YouTube in its entirety in 10 parts. Its my very first film. Its a weird, misguided, underfunded homunculus of a film... I miss you, Wally.

Watch the first in the series, below:

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Salon recently caught up with the actor and comedian on the phone to discuss “The Office,” his SoulPancake project and his new TV special "Oprah and Rainn Wilson Present SoulPancake" premiering this Sunday on OWN, which focuses on exploring “life’s big questions.” This interview has been edited for space and clarity.

Why did you and your friends (Joshua Homnick and Devon Gundry) start SoulPancake?

Before the series, our goal was starting a website, called SoulPancake.com. I really wanted to do something positive on the internet. I wanted to try to get young people talking about, thinking about, life’s big questions--make it cool and OK to wonder about the heart, the soul and free will and God and death and big topics like that, big human topics.

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1. When Steve Carell left "The Office," it sent the show into a frenzy to crown the “next boss.” Determining said boss was the major theme of last season, and the reason there were guest-starring roles for Will Arnett, James Spader, Ray Romano, as well as longer story arcs for Catherine Tate and James Spader as the mellow perveball Robert California. But after all that fuss, there is currently no boss in “The Office” at all — Andy Bernard (Ed Helms) is on a long vacation to the Caribbean and has been MIA for weeks — and it’s ... totally fine. The show’s in much better shape than it was during the doldrums of last year, and the huge supporting cast has more to do. In hindsight, "The Office" would have been better served ignoring, rather than trying to fill, Carell’s shoes.

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Wilson's parody effectively turned into an ad for the show, as he reiterated not to watch the show's final season, which airs at "Thursday nights, 9 o'clock, on NBC." "It's the enemy," said Wilson. "Hopefully people will listen to me, and not watch this filth called 'The Office.'"

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h/t Uproxx

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"The Office" is closing. Last week it was announced that the forthcoming season will be the last for the beloved sitcom, which for almost a decade has regaled audiences with tongue-in-cheek, knowing-dumb humor and has changed the face of comedic television. Greg Daniels, executive producer, told Variety,"This year feels like the last chance to really go out together and make an artistic ending of the show.”

Of course he's right—the loss of Steve Carell as bumbling boss Michael Scott last season was an unrecoverable blow to the dynamic of "The Office," and though the cast is packed with more prodigious talent than almost any other comedy on television, the post-Carell narrative never seemed to gel. Last season was mildly funny, but had the effect of a beer sitting open in the fridge for a couple of days—the remnants of flavor were there, but there was no fizz. The savvy actors felt it: once season eight kicked in and the response flatlined, they started dropping like flies. James Spader, whose character was invented to fill in the -sized hole, announced he'd leave after one season, even though his appearances were already nominal. Mindy Kaling and BJ Novak, both writers on the show as well as actors, said they were leaving too, the former to work on her eponymous new sitcom. Their departure is certain to leave a giant gap in season nine, their characters stand-outs in the ensemble cast, with Kaling's ditzy-smart, uber-girly girl character constantly pining after, then manipulating, Novak's corner-cutting hotshot. The only hope is that Daniels is correct—that there's still time to save the show from an undignified end, and that the writers and actors will come through with a burst of energy in the clutch.

However, even if next season ends up becoming a hot mess, we'll still have so much we learned from the beautiful years prior—from workplace economics, to besting a rival coworker.

1. True love is real.

Somehow "The Office" managed to drag out a ships-passing-in-the-night love story much longer than was logically tenable and never once played it too corny or predictable. Specifically, three years into the series were spent slowly building the tension between Jim and Pam, with the possibility of their union ambiguous the whole time. Yet even Jim's short relationship with a smart and sweet-faced character played by Rashida Jones couldn't dampen audiences' yearning for the star-crossed lovers to unite. So when it finally happened, and Jim and Pam began to blossom into a family, it was a small miracle that they didn't cheese it up beyond belief—and it relied entirely on the long shot of the spying documentary cam, peering at Jim on bended knee with a ring in the rain through the dissonant pane of a car window. Who says CCTV can't be artful?

2. Don't sleep with your superiors.

While there was plenty of workplace intercourse (ahem), it was refreshing to see that most of the power-imbalance relationships involved males reaching up, particularly in the case of Michael Scott, who enters a relationship with Jan Levenson, Vice President of Sales at Corporate Headquarters, which is eventually consummated during a ridiculously trashy vacation at a Sandals chain resort in Jamaica. All goes along well until Jan gets downsized, begins milking Scott for his savings, which go in part to her boob job. Eventually, because she was always at least subconsciously thinking she was dating beneath her to begin with, she dumps him, but not before breaking his heart. Jan and Michael's interactions were always deeply hilarious, but the undercurrent of power-imbalance was a lesson to heed indeed.

3. Those guys in the warehouse? They might be smarter than you.

One of the best narratives in the entire series was the trajectory of Daryl Philbin, the paper company's warehouse foreman who perpetually has to put up with the racism and various other stupidities of Michael Scott. Played by Craig Robinson, Daryl was consistently one of "The Office"'s best characters, playing on Scott's white expectations by clowning him so hard, all the time, Michael none the wiser. The most classic: when Michael asks if the mild-mannered, working class Daryl has ever been in a gang, Daryl feigns tough, claiming that he'd been in not only the Bloods, the Crips and the Latin Kings, but also the Warriors and the Newsies. Daryl's so clearly smarter than Michael (to be fair, so are 99% of the other employees in the office, too), but a few seasons in he develops a somewhat bemused tolerance for his blunders. And eventually, Daryl gets his: the CEO recognizes him for his work, gives him an office in The Office, and he's recognized and promoted for his ideas and work. It took a long time, but it's a lesson in workplace equality—and you can tell that in those latter episodes, both the writers and the actors reveled in getting Michael Scott's guff with Daryl's consistently superior ideas.

4. Agritourism is real.

One of the show's most successful, surprising, and innovative points was the character development of the exceedingly odd Dwight Schrute, played brilliantly by Rainn Wilson. Aside from the concept that Dwight owned and lived on a beet farm with his somewhat freakish cousin Mose, that Dwight's favorite movie is The Crow and he claims to have slayed a werewolf, that he's a survivalist/SecondLife enthusiast who claimed to have first flown an airplane at the age of four: Dwight Schrute is a woman magnet, enticing just about any lady he encounters with his off-kilter and unlikely masculinity. There is a rumor that once "The Office" ends, there will be a Dwight Schrute spin-off about his life on the beet farm. Even if he weren't one of the show's most popular and beloved characters, it'd be worth creating that show just to avoid wasting all the intricate, incredible, and unending personal oddities the writers have crafted for him. Screw a spin-off, Dwight Schrute should have a theme park.

5. How to give the best deadpan.

There is currently no existent YouTube supercut splicing all "The Office"'s into-the-camera deadpan looks, and this is a travesty of the internet. Throughout the course of eight years, the sitcom's conceits that they're constantly being filmed by a crew of documentarians, who will apparently, finally be revealed in season nine. This set-up has provided so many looks of nonplussed, eye-rolling bemusement leveled straight at the viewer that it's almost been a master class in comedic timing. Indeed, since consuming every episode of the office, I personally feel better at telling stories, knowing exactly when to pause expectantly (Michael), when to raise an eyebrow (Kelly), when to serve excited incredulity (Andy, Erin), when to serve over-it incredulity (Jim, Pam), and when to look smug and self-satisfied (Dwight Schrute!). If that's all we ever get out of it, those looks will be forever burned in America's minds, as comedically significant as George Burns' cigar or Richard Pryor's smirk. Thanks for the memories, thanks for the deadpans.

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It’s past time for the show to wrap up, especially because as soon as it does, I can put these recent seasons in their proper place — the so-so coda to a sharp, hilarious, squishy-in-the-middle show — and go back to appreciating the high-level sitcomery "The Office" practiced for so long and the single-camera comedy revolution it helped usher in.

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On the surface, a sitcom about a young, kooky OB/GYN with a spotty dating history and a penchant for getting falling-down drunk doesn't exactly scream "groundbreaking." But it's the presence of the woman who's given us the fearlessly self-obsessed Kelly Kapoor on "The Office" all these years, who wrote a book called "Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?" and who launched her career channeling Ben Affleck in a play, that gives the show the distinct possibility of actually not sucking.

Why is Kaling great? Why does her formulaic show look considerably more promising than the already-canceled-in-my-mind "Guys With Kids"? For starters, she's already been at it for seven years. TV is her zone. She doesn't harbor the affected air of a stand-up comic or a slumming movie star, trying to cram herself into 22 fake-fun minutes. Instead, like "SNL" veterans Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, she's got a natural flair and rhythm for the medium.

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Yesterday, show-runner Paul Lieberstein, who also plays the phlegmatic Tobey Flenderson, announced he would be stepping down to focus on a possible “Office” spinoff called “The Farm,” set at Dwight Schrute’s beet farm. If that show gets picked up, Dwight (Rainn Wilson) would presumably be leaving Dunder Mifflin as well. Writer Mindy Kaling, who also plays the wonderfully vapid Kelly Kapoor, is writing and starring in her own pilot for Fox, and John Krasinski, Ed Helms, Jenna Fischer and B.J. Novak — the first two of whom could, and to some extent do, have fairly robust film careers — are all in “stalled” contract negotiations for next season. Even James Spader, whose zen-asshole Robert California has only been on the show for one year, won’t be back.

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There are times when he casually shatters his employees' confidence simply because he's a powerful man who's used to saying whatever pops into his head without fear of punishment. (When he prompted Andy to talk about his attraction to Erin, and Andy obliged, California cut him off with, "I'm afraid you've lost my interest.") But so far there's no indication that he's anything but fundamentally decent; based on last week's Halloween episode, during which he brought his son to work, he's also a good dad with a deep (if unusual) connection to his child. He's not a craven, impulsive, inadvertently destructive person, as Michael often was. He's wry and aloof. He seems to view the goings-on at the Scranton branch from a lofty perspective -- including the reflexive ass-kissing that greets his every pronouncement, no matter how whimsical or baffling. His visits to the Scranton branch are charged with an excitement that no other regular "Office" character ever summoned, and it's not just because he's the CEO. His peculiar energy sparks love and respect as well as fear. (Andy greeted him by blurting out, "Hi, Dad.")

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